"The Guard retreats!" cried someone near the Emperor.
"La Garde recule!" rose here and there from the battlefield. "La Garde recule!" Men caught up the cry in wonder and despair. Could it be true? Yes. Back they came out of the smoke. Now was the supreme opportunity for the allies. The Duke, recklessly exposing himself on the crest of the hill, bullets flying about him, as they flew about Napoleon, yet leading apparently a charmed life, closed his field-glass and turned to the red line that had made good its defense.
"Up!" he cried, waving his hand and not finishing his sentence.
They needed no other signal. Their time to attack had come. Down the hill they rushed, yelling, followed by Belgians, Netherlanders, and all the rest, pressing hard upon their heels. La Haye Sainte was recaptured in the twinkling of an eye. The shattered broken remains of the Guard were driven in headlong rout. The assailers of Hougomont were themselves assaulted. At last numbers had overwhelmed Lobau. The survivors of an army of a hundred and thirty thousand flushed with victory fell on the survivors of an army of seventy thousand already defeated.
At half-past seven the battle was lost. At eight the withdrawal became a retreat, the retreat a rout. At set of sun lost was the Emperor, lost was the Empire. Ended was the age-long struggle which had begun with the fall of the Bastile more than a score of years before. Once again from France, with the downfall of Napoleon, had been snatched the hegemony of the world.
There was no reserve. There was nothing to cover a retreat. Someone raised the wild cry not often heard on battlefields overlooked by Napoleon, and it was echoed everywhere:
"Sauve qui peut."
The army as an army was gone. Thousands of men in mad terror fled in every direction. Still, there were left a few battalions of the Guard which had not been in action. They formed three squares to receive the English and Prussians. Into the nearest square Napoleon, bewildered, overwhelmed, stricken by the catastrophe, was led on his horse. His sword was out. He would fain have died on that field. Doubtless, many a bullet marked him, but none struck him. For a little while these squares of the Guard, Napoleon in the center one, another square on either side of the center one, stayed the British and Prussian advance, but it was not to be. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera!" The Emperor gave no order. Bertrand and Soult turned his horse about and the squares retreated.
It was night. They were the sole organized body left. Well, they upheld their ancient fame and glorious reputation and untarnished honor. Through the calm and moonlit night pursuers and pursued could hear the rolling of the brass drums far and wide over the countryside as the Guard marched away from that field back to stricken France, to that famous grenadier march, "La Grenadière."
Again and again they stopped to beat off the furious attack of the cavalry. Again and again the Prussian pursuers hurled themselves unavailingly on quadrangles of steel, worked up to a terrible pitch of excitement by the possibility that they might seize the Emperor at whose behest and for whose purpose fifty thousand men lay dead or wounded on that fatal hill, in that dreadful valley. Happy the fate of those who were dead—horrible the condition of those who were wounded. English, Prussians, Germans, Bavarians, Hollanders, French, trampled together in indistinguishable masses. Horses, guns, weapons, equipment—everything in hopeless confusion. Every horror, every anguish, every agony was there—incense burned about the altar of one devouring ambition.